[6.0 - 6.4 Spoilers] An interesting video detailing Venat's polarizing reception

[Alenore]

I'm not making any kind of a commentary about societal record-keeping in a time period that the EE Vol.1 specifically refers to as 'prehistory', because that has nothing to do with individual/personal memory. If you would like to attempt to offer a rebuttal, I would recommend that you revisit those points directly, as my argument still stands, unchallenged.

Pre-history would be before the First Umbral era.
Here's the rebutal.

The first step is to determine how sundering someone or something actually works, before arriving at any conclusions. This entire discussion hinges on whether sundering someone:

• kills them
• destroys all their memories

This entire discussion doens't hinge on that, it rests on the sundering destroying the sense of self and most memories of the previous person, to a point they are virtually gone. This is what people mean when they say it "kills them".

Emet-Selch's demonstration on Ryne in the Ocular during the Shadowbringers MSQ doesn't seem to support either of these. In fact, Emet makes a deliberate point of stating that 'this singular ability strikes not at such banal things as flesh'. We also know that sundered souls can retain memories from before the sundering, including some flashbacks of the Amaurotine Final Days. The entire plotline around Amon/Fandaniel hinges on him retaining his memories of Elpis from before the time that he was sundered. So that contradicts the second point as well.

The rest of the sentence is "but everything that defines the target, diluting its existence". Which means the soul, the memories, the reality of the being itself. His demonstration on Ryne literaly states they would be identicial in appearance, but reduced in all respects : "all is halved" to borrow is term.

We can try to piece together an understanding of how sundering magic works by inference. Argos seems to be an early precursor to sundering magic, and his duplicates are directly referred to as 'reflections' in the quest text when you encounter him on the moon. He appears to be able to sunder and rejoin himself without consequence, and his memories of who you are seem to be still preserved across 12000 years.

Are we supposed to think every NPC that create images of itself is actually a form of sundering? I mean, it checks out since Argos is Venat's direct creation. But just recently, we had Oschon create images. Ifrit does it. Etc.

During the Pandaemonium questline, Lahabrea splits his soul into two, and deliberately seals away part of his personality and memories around Athena on to one of his soul fragments. This process doesn't kill him, but does result in some memories being unique to each reflection, while others appear to be shared. He seems to be able to consciously plan for what information each fragment is able to recall. That suggests to me that memories aren't necessarily 'encoded' to a single locus on a soul (perhaps there's a degree of redundancy, if you want to use a RAID analogy). Splitting the soul doesn't seem like it necessarily damages the information encoded on it.

No, it doesn't kill him in the sense his soul went to the Aetherial Sea to be reborn. He also split a part of his soul in a controlled manner, with specific informations. Venat split everything in 14, she probably didn't take time to check every single being and how it'd affect them.

I think if you want to develop a theoretical framework to explain all this, you need to have a clear understanding of how memory works in FFXIV and how this relates to aether. Because the rules are different from how they work in our own world.

Even inanimate objects have memory, as seen in Venat's demonstration of the Echo on Elpis. You don't need a living being to be physically present. And we know that the sundering affects inanimate objects as well, because the geographical features of the First were all parallels of Eorzea. It's not like they were destroyed in the process. So it really doesn't seem like Sundering actually damages corporeal aether (which again, we could have predicted if we listened to Emet-Selch's original explanation).

Inanimate objects don't have memory. The form of echo Venat use in Elpis is described as "piecing together an event from ripples left in ambient aether". The idea is aether simply has an afterimage of what happens. Since the Sundering splits everything (as said by Emet when he explained it), and since it's a well known fact that sunderign reduces the aetherial density, these memories are affected in the same way.

Dying doesn't remove your memories either. Endwalker used this 'underwater' effect as a storytelling motif whenever the narrator was floating around in the lifestream, during both the MSQ and Pandaemonium. Despite being very dead, both Emet and Elidibus still can recall what happened to them while they're waiting to dissolve back into the lifestream.

Your memories have to first be 'cleansed' by the lifestream before your soul returns back to the cycle. Until that happens, you still retain all your memories. Even after being sundered, those memories are preserved unless that cleansing process occurs fully. Cue to Asahi furiously scrubbing Fandaniel's soul.

You still use the definition of killing as in "going back to the Sea", which, again, is obviously not what people mean when they said the Ancients were killed. Ancients themselves never had a chance to even go back to the Sea, since they were sundered, effectively removing their memories, and their presence from the world, instead replaced by 14 beings somewhat like them, but with gaping holes in everything.

Either way, the fundamental assumptions that underpin this entire discussion are flawed, and the contradictions become quickly obvious if you were asking questions rather than trying to force conclusions of your own choosing.

See above

The only reason why the term 'genocide' gets thrown around deliberately and inappropriately in here is because some Ascian enjoyers see it as an opportunity to pull an 'Uno Reverse' on the discussions of Stormblood from some six years ago.

No, it's because it's exactly the same.
- Venat split souls, and creates new life from shards of the previous. The ones who were before are gone, to the profit of new people. In doing so, calamities happen and people of the Source face hardships.
- Ascians merge souls, reinforcing the source version. The shards are gone, to the profit of current people. In doing so, a calamity happens on the Source as well.